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The Hemingway Plot


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They themselves say this is their best shot at proving that RFK planned to kill Castro, and David Corn and "They call me Gus" Russo pull no punches in twisting this story into a major plot that if you read closely, just isn't there. Then they try to blame the Kennedy's for locking the record away. Give me a break -BK

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=...0326&s=corn

The Old Man and the CIA: A Kennedy Plot to Kill Castro?

by DAVID CORN & GUS RUSSO

[from the March 26, 2001 issue]

Did John and Robert Kennedy plot murder? For decades, a clear answer to that dicey question has evaded historians, while Kennedy loyalists have fought hard to prevent such a stain from befouling the memory of the brothers. But a thirty-nine-year-old Pentagon memorandum--found three years ago by a college professor and heretofore unpublicized--suggests that Jack and Bobby discussed and apparently sanctioned the development of a possible assassination attempt against Fidel Castro during a 1962 meeting in the Oval Office. And--in a weirder-than-fiction twist--the scheme they considered involved Ernest Hemingway's farm outside Havana.

It's no secret now that President Kennedy and his brother the Attorney General wanted Fidel Castro out of the way. After Castro thwarted the Kennedy-approved and CIA-orchestrated invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, the Kennedys continued to seek means of toppling the Cuban leader. In early 1962, according to a CIA memo, Bobby Kennedy told a group of CIA and Pentagon officials that a solution to the Cuban problem carried "the top priority in the United States government--all else is secondary." Soon after, the CIA, which had begun planning murder plots against Castro during the Eisenhower Administration, was again devising a variety of assassination plans--efforts that would involve an exploding seashell, poison pills, a toxin-contaminated diving suit and Mafia associates. Ever since this clandestine activity started becoming public in the 1970s, former CIA officers have maintained that John and Robert Kennedy were fully aware of and supportive of the agency's lethal intentions, that the CIA conspirators were not rogues but loyal civil servants following orders. Kennedy defenders countered that no piece of paper shows that the pair specifically endorsed or authorized hit jobs.

In his Robert Kennedy and His Times, historian and former Kennedy Administration official Arthur Schlesinger Jr. passionately declared, "The available evidence clearly leads to the conclusion that the Kennedys did not know about the Castro assassination plots before the Bay of Pigs or about the pursuit of those plots by the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. No one who knew John and Robert Kennedy well believed they would conceivably countenance a program of assassination.... I, too, find the idea incredible that these two men, so filled with love of life and so conscious of the ironies of history, could thus deny all the values and purposes that animated their existence." (In 1998, at Schlesinger's urging, the New York Times published an "editor's note" saying that while some "historians and officials with knowledge of intelligence matters...have asserted" that JFK ordered the CIA to assassinate Castro, "others, also close to the President, dispute their account.") In his recent biography of Robert Kennedy, Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of Newsweek, wrote, "RFK's own views on assassination in this period have remained difficult to ascertain.... Kennedy's closest aides flatly denied that he ever ordered an assassination or discussed the possibility."

The Pentagon document--once classified Top Secret--was released by the Assassination Records Review Board in late 1997, and its significance was first noticed by Larry Haapanen, a professor at Lewis and Clark State College. The memo records a meeting of senior national security officials in the Oval Office on March 16, 1962. It was written shortly after the afternoon gathering by Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, whom President Kennedy had placed in charge of Operation Mongoose, a new interagency project cooked up in November 1961 with the ultimate goal of overthrowing Castro. Present for the conversation were McGeorge Bundy, National Security Adviser; John McCone, Director of Central Intelligence; Gen. Maxwell Taylor, military adviser to the President; Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Roswell Gilpatric, deputy secretary of the Defense Department; U. Alexis Johnson, a deputy under secretary at the State Department; and Lansdale. The subject at hand was setting presidential guidelines for Operation Mongoose. Lansdale reported on efforts to train anti-Castro Cuban agents in guerrilla warfare. President Kennedy told the group he would not yet approve any direct US military intervention in Cuba. Next, the conversation turned to another matter. This is how Lansdale captured it in his "memorandum for the record":

The Attorney General then mentioned Mary Hemingway [Ernest Hemingway's widow], commenting on reports that Castro was drinking heavily in disgruntlement over the way things were going, and the opportunities offered by the "shrine" to Hemingway. I commented that this was a conversation that Ed Murrow [the former news broadcaster then heading the US Information Agency] had had with Mary Hemingway, that we had similar reports from other sources, and that this was worth assessing firmly and pursuing vigorously. If there are grounds for action, CIA had some invaluable assets which might well be committed for such an effort. McCone asked if his operational people were aware of this; I told him that we had discussed this, that they agreed the subject was worth vigorous development, and that we were in agreement that the matter was
so delicate and sensitive
that it shouldn't be surfaced to the Special Group [an elite interagency group that reviewed covert actions] until we were ready to go, and then not in detail. I pointed out that this all pertained to
fractioning the regime
. If it happened, it could develop like a brush-fire, much as in Hungary, and we must be prepared to help it win our goal of Cuba freed of a Communist government. [Emphasis added.]

In the memo, Lansdale mentioned no further details about an operation that could take advantage of the Hemingway "shrine," a reference to the farm Hemingway had owned in Cuba, which was then being converted into a museum. He was writing in his own sort of covert-op-speak. In another memo, he used a term similar to "fractioning the regime" to refer to anti-Castro actions that included the assassination of Castro. (An August 13, 1962, Lansdale memo employed the phrase "splitting the regime" to describe activities "including liquidation of leaders.") With Operation Mongoose ultimately aimed at prompting a popular uprising in Cuba, the Kennedy men could well have been hoping that an assassination would spark such a "brush-fire."

Lansdale's description of the Hemingway plan as "so delicate and sensitive" that its specifics should be hidden from the Special Group is another tip-off that the operation involved assassination. "That's the giveaway," says Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and a specialist on US documents regarding Cuba. "This is the closest thing to a smoking gun that has been declassified. Only assassination would be taboo for open discussion at the Special Group, which routinely planned sabotage, violence and chaos to undermine Castro."

Loch Johnson, an intelligence expert who worked on the Senate Church Committee (which first disclosed the CIA assassination plots in 1975), says the Lansdale document is "a fascinating memo. It looks like another one of the plots against Castro." Several CIA alumni support this interpretation. Ted Shackley, who served as Miami chief of station during Operation Mongoose, remarks, "It certainly has the earmarks of an assassination plot." Samuel Halpern, who was the number-two to the officer who ran the CIA end of Operation Mongoose, calls the document "as close as we're likely to get" to conclusive proof. And a former CIA director says, "The language of the memo speaks for itself. The only thing Robert Kennedy can be referring to is the assassination of Castro. This paragraph should never have been written."

It is not clear what specific operation Robert Kennedy was referring to at the March 16 meeting. Neither Halpern nor Shackley recalls receiving orders for a mission involving the Hemingway farm. Those Mongoose records that have been declassified do not refer to an assassination attempt at the Hemingway home. And none of the meeting's participants are alive. Kennedy's Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who was scheduled to attend this session but did not, says of this conversation and the Hemingway-shrine operation, "I don't know anything about it. The whole Mongoose thing was insane."

The March 16, 1962, meeting occurred at a time when Operation Mongoose was revving up. Lansdale was busy concocting plans for infiltrating Cuba with commando and sabotage teams. The CIA's Miami station was hurriedly recruiting agents in Cuba. At another Mongoose session five days later, Robert Kennedy, who was the de facto supervisor of the covert campaign against Castro, raised the prospect of kidnapping top-level Cuban leaders. (The previous year Robert Kennedy had been informed that the CIA had attempted to kill Castro before the Bay of Pigs invasion.) In April 1962 the CIA's murder plots against Castro were reactivated. That month, Shackley and Bill Harvey, the CIA official in charge of operations against Cuba, delivered a U-Haul filled with arms to a mob-linked hoodlum named John Rosselli, who was supposed to transfer the weapons to Cuban exiles interested in murdering Castro. (The available historical record shows no other Mongoose meetings attended by President Kennedy.)

According to Lansdale's memo, the discussion of this particular operation had been triggered by comments made by Mary Hemingway, who had had a brief encounter with Castro eight months earlier. On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in Ketchum, Idaho. Shortly after that, Mary Hemingway, his fourth wife, decided to travel to Cuba to visit Finca Vigia, the farm Hemingway owned outside Havana, and retrieve manuscripts, paintings and other belongings. Before she left Ketchum, a Cuban government official phoned and said that Cuba wanted to establish a museum at Finca Vigia. Because there was a US ban on travel to Cuba, Mary enlisted the assistance of William Walton, a journalist and artist close to President Kennedy. Walton asked the President for help, and within hours Mary was cleared for the trip. Valerie Danby-Smith, who had been Hemingway's secretary (and who would later marry his youngest son and assume the Hemingway name), accompanied the widow.

When the two women arrived at the end of July, according to Valerie Hemingway, Castro sent them a big basket of fruit and word that if they required assistance they should contact him, for he was a Hemingway fan. And several nights later, Castro came calling. In her autobiography, Mary Hemingway, who died in 1986, noted that Castro "arrived in his jeep, accompanied only by one nondescript car." He had brought just a few aides with him, no battalion of bodyguards. "There was not much security, and that impressed Mary," Valerie Hemingway recalls. Mary lined up the servants to greet the Cuban chief. Castro came into the house. Mary served him coffee. They discussed the transfer of Finca Vigia to the Cuban government; Castro reminisced about having fished with Ernest. "Much of the conversation was banter," Valerie Hemingway says. Castro inspected the mounted animal heads and asked to see where Hemingway had written his stories. Mary guided him to the three-story tower she had built as a writing studio for Ernest several yards from the main house. ("Ernest hated the tower and always wrote in his bedroom," Valerie Hemingway notes.)

At the tower, Castro, without waiting for his aides, bounded up the stairs to the office on the top floor, and Mary followed. "Mary was also impressed with that," Valerie Hemingway says. "She thought that any other national leader would have ordered an aide to go up ahead of him. Make sure it was safe. It was an ideal place to do in Castro. She would remark on that many times over the years."

In the weeks afterward, Mary and Valerie sorted out the mess at Finca Vigia; Hemingway had started coming there in 1938, but he had not been back since the late 1950s. They reviewed thousands of pages of unpublished work, burned his personal papers (in accordance with his wishes), labeled the animal heads (who shot it, when and where), put the house in order for display and packed up possessions Mary wished to keep. Since they could only take hand luggage with them on the return flight to Miami, they arranged for a shrimp boat heading to Tampa for repairs to transport crates holding Hemingway's papers, paintings by Paul Klee, Juan Gris and André Masson, and other keepsakes.

From September 1961 to January 1962, Mary Hemingway, still in shock over her husband's suicide (she considered it a gun accident), stayed in Idaho. Sometime around February, she returned to her flat in New York City. And she shared with her friends stories about her trip to Cuba, her meeting with Castro and how she had managed to spirit Hemingway's papers and the paintings out of Cuba. In the second week of March, stories appeared in the New York Times and the New York Post about her time in Cuba, though neither mentioned Castro's light security detail and his cavalier climb to the top of the tower. One of her friends, Clifton Daniel, the assistant managing editor at the Times and husband of Margaret Truman, contacted US Information Agency chief Edward R. Murrow and suggested that he speak with Mary Hemingway. As Murrow replied to Daniel in a March 20, 1962, letter, "Mary Hemingway did call. We had an interesting and useful conversation and I passed her remarks on to one or two interested parties down here." (The USIA was a participant in Operation Mongoose. Daniels and Murrow are deceased.)

"The tower could be the key to it," Valerie Hemingway says. "It was what impressed Mary Hemingway the most about Castro." Valerie Hemingway insists that Mary Hemingway would not have consciously aided or abetted a scheme against Castro. In her autobiography, Mary recalled attending a dinner at the White House in April 1962, where she "irked" President Kennedy by calling his confrontational position toward Cuba "stupid, unrealistic and, worse, ineffective."

Assassinating Castro at the Hemingway site does seem far-fetched. But in the secret war against Castro, the US government entertained many bizarre ideas, including dusting his shoes with a chemical that would cause his beard to fall out. One scheme called for the use of pyrotechnics to light up the Cuban sky in order to convince the Cuban people that the Second Coming was at hand; presumably, they would then rise up to overthrow Castro. ("Elimination by illumination," as one official dubbed it.) Yet at the time of the March 16 meeting, the CIA was probably not in a position to mount a hit against Castro, despite Lansdale's overly optimistic assessment that the agency possessed "invaluable assets which might well be committed for" the Hemingway-shrine endeavor. "We didn't have any assets that could do anything with this information then," says John Sherwood, a former CIA case officer who worked on the Cuba task force. "We had a few agents in Cuba who could send us secret-writing intelligence reports. That was it." But, Sherwood adds, that did not stop US intelligence from hatching ideas: "All kinds of things bubbled up then. If Mary Hemingway goes to her cottage in Cuba and comes back and says something about a slight security detail or anything else, people would have been interested. No one knew anything. Any information about Castro was exciting. We never penetrated his entourage. We never knew where he was."

The March 16 memo may not persuade Kennedy believers. In a letter to Professor Haapanen, written on April 17, 1998, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, "That is an interesting document you have unearthed.... I don't think, however, that it establishes that JFK and RFK authorized or were aware of the CIA assassination plots. [Director of Central Intelligence] John McCone, who participated in the discussion, has always denied any knowledge of the plots, so unless he is lying, he did not interpret the reference to the Hemingway shrine as part of an assassination project." Schlesinger assumes McCone told the truth, but McCone's denial has not stood up well over the years. At a CIA seminar in 1991, Walt Elder, McCone's executive assistant, said that McCone had instructed Richard Helms, then the agency's chief of covert operations, to keep him uninformed about the murder schemes. Moreover, Schlesinger suggests no other reasonable reading of the discussion regarding the Hemingway farm. In a recent letter to the authors, Schlesinger wrote, "Heaven knows what Lansdale was talking about, but he was much given to crackpot ideas." Yet this Who-knows? response does not acknowledge that, according to the memo, it was Robert Kennedy, not Lansdale, who first mentioned the Hemingway-shrine "opportunities." (As Samuel Halpern recalls, "Lansdale took solid notes--very accurate.") Schlesinger does comment: "I understand how others might place a different interpretation on the document" from his.

There may be a definitive answer to the question, Did the Kennedys dabble in murder? Fifteen hundred linear feet and fifty boxes of Robert F. Kennedy's classified and confidential papers are stored at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and most of the material is closed to the public. No other Attorney General walked off the job with such a trove of government paperwork. A partial guide to these records lists scores of intriguing files, including documents pertaining to Operation Mongoose, the CIA and Cuba, Edward Lansdale and Edward Murrow. (The guide also refers to Frank Sinatra files that contain "references to various gangsters, including [sam] Giancana and others...including Judith Campbell," a JFK mistress.) But the Kennedy family considers these papers--many of which Robert Kennedy obtained from the CIA, the FBI or the State Department--the private property of his heirs. It strictly limits access to the records, which are being stored at government expense. Several eminent historians who have requested permission to examine this historical treasure--including Richard Reeves, Robert Dallek, Nigel Hamilton, Laurence Leamer and Seymour Hersh--have been turned away by the Kennedys. Evan Thomas was allowed to see only portions of the material. And Max Kennedy, a son of Robert and the person who oversees these records, did not respond to our request to look at the files for this story. Official papers RFK generated in the course of public business should be open to public inspection, and the release of classified government records that he took when he left office ought to be controlled not by the Kennedy family but by government declassifiers subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Forty years after the Kennedy glory days, it is well known that John Kennedy's Camelot had its dark side. Debate remains over how dark. The March 16 memo offers evidence that John and Robert participated in one of the ugliest exercises of those turbulent days. Blowing away Castro at the onetime home of Ernest Hemingway, an author admired by John Kennedy as well as Fidel Castro, sounds more like derring-do conjured up by a novelist than a plan contemplated by an Attorney General in the presence of a President. Yet that's the most logical reading of this piece of the incomplete historical record--a record which will remain incomplete as long as the Kennedy family keeps sitting on thousands of the RFK documents.

Edited by William Kelly
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You guys neglected to include the graphic that goes with the article.

The photo offers clear proof that RFK was, in fact, obsessed with getting Castro.

I attached it:

That's a good one Myra.

Castro can't run that fast today -( Beep! Beep! )- and the view of Castro bounding up Hemingway's tower, that he never used, is almost cartoonish. Maybe we can get Dale Myers to do a computer graphics of it.

Now if we knew this would happen in advance, what would be the weapon of choice? Cigar? No. Exploding typewriter? Rabid cat?

And look at their character witnesses - the same public spokesmen for the CIA that alway chirp in with the chorus when it comes to proving JFK and RFK planned and ordered specific plots/operations to kill Castro.

Whenever you get down to the details of RFK's plots to kill Castro, the proof evaporates, and all the documents reflect that RFK okayed and ordered economic sabatoge operations, one of which may have included unofficial plans to kill Castro, specific operations that were re-directed to Dealey Plaza.

That RFK's ostensible intended victim - Castro, is still alive, and both JFK and RFK are dead says a lot more about CIA plans that went astray than any of Mad Max's propaganda.

Notice Corn and so-called expert researcher Gus Russo don't bother to look at JM/WAVE's tactical operations - particularly those that ran April-Nov. 1963, to see if Hemingway's Nest was targeted by any specific anti-Castro Commando Team.

They even think of going down that alley and then don't bother, just blowing it off as not being necessary to make their point that RFK had a plan to kill Castro at Hemingway's house.

Rather than ask NANA and the CIA for the JMWAVE docs that would answer their question - err allegation, they blame the Kennedy library for secreting all the answers away. Of course RFK's appointments book for the entire year of 1963 was stolen, no doubt by one of the rascal Kennedys.

BK

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You guys neglected to include the graphic that goes with the article.

The photo offers clear proof that RFK was, in fact, obsessed with getting Castro.

I attached it:

That's a good one Myra.

Castro can't run that fast today -( Beep! Beep! )- and the view of Castro bounding up Hemingway's tower, that he never used, is almost cartoonish. Maybe we can get Dale Myers to do a computer graphics of it.

Now if we knew this would happen in advance, what would be the weapon of choice? Cigar? No. Exploding typewriter? Rabid cat?

...

Acme Commie-B-Gone.

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I remember back in the day, when I lived in a different world from the real one, leafing through Mary Hemingway's book in a library. It talked about Hemingway's mental illness toward the end, manifested in his belief that he was being spied on by the FBI.

I remember thinking yes, he must have been pretty out of it if he thought that all the FBI had to do was spy on a respected American novelist.

Sometimes I miss that simple life when I thought like a simpleton.

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I remember back in the day, when I lived in a different world from the real one, leafing through Mary Hemingway's book in a library. It talked about Hemingway's mental illness toward the end, manifested in his belief that he was being spied on by the FBI.

I remember thinking yes, he must have been pretty out of it if he thought that all the FBI had to do was spy on a respected American novelist.

Sometimes I miss that simple life when I thought like a simpleton.

Hemingway worked for ONI during WWII, sailing the Pilar out of Cuba and Key West, reporting on any sightings of Nazi U boats. His son was an OSS Jedberg, parachuted behind the lines before D-Day to meet with partisan commandos, but was captured.

Hemingway then became a war correspondent, liberating the bar at the Hotel Ritz in Paris with OSS officer David Bruce.

His mental health may have deteriated at the end, and like DeMohrenschildt, officially died from a shotgun blast to the head.

Bk

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I remember back in the day, when I lived in a different world from the real one, leafing through Mary Hemingway's book in a library. It talked about Hemingway's mental illness toward the end, manifested in his belief that he was being spied on by the FBI.

I remember thinking yes, he must have been pretty out of it if he thought that all the FBI had to do was spy on a respected American novelist.

Sometimes I miss that simple life when I thought like a simpleton.

Hemingway worked for ONI during WWII, sailing the Pilar out of Cuba and Key West, reporting on any sightings of Nazi U boats. His son was an OSS Jedberg, parachuted behind the lines before D-Day to meet with partisan commandos, but was captured.

Hemingway then became a war correspondent, liberating the bar at the Hotel Ritz in Paris with OSS officer David Bruce.

His mental health may have deteriated at the end, and like DeMohrenschildt, officially died from a shotgun blast to the head.

Bk

Corn is an awful writer, and I don't think that I have read (yet) Russo's epistle, The Outfit (about the Chicago mob).

And they say "Blowing away Castro at the onetime home of Ernest Hemingway" like it's some kind of bad thing.

I appreciate the reminder of Hemingway's prior service during WWII.

I think that he actually chronicles it in one of his posthumously published works, the name of which presently escapes me.

The name of the book is "Islands in the Stream".

Edited by Christopher Hall
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Notice how those who propose that the Kennedys ploted to kill Castro are the same fellows who claim that Castro killed JFK, and that the same writers - Russo - Holland - Powers, Corn, et al., also drag out the same expert witnesses - Halpern, Shackley, Haig?

Aren't they the same guys who were on the Cuban Task Force at either CIA Langly or JM/WAVE, and involved in both plots - to kill Castro and Kennedy?

BK

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  • 1 year later...
Notice how those who propose that the Kennedys ploted to kill Castro are the same fellows who claim that Castro killed JFK, and that the same writers - Russo - Holland - Powers, Corn, et al., also drag out the same expert witnesses - Halpern, Shackley, Haig?

Aren't they the same guys who were on the Cuban Task Force at either CIA Langly or JM/WAVE, and involved in both plots - to kill Castro and Kennedy?

BK

Russo drags out the Hemingway plot again in his book Brothers In Arms - The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Assassination.

This must be delt with again precisely because it is not only the best evidence they have of the Kennedys actually approving a specific assassination plan to kill Castro, those quoted as supporting this view are precisely the same people who are in the room with JFK in April 63 when he approves some of the Covert Ops against Cuba, some of which end up in Dallas.

BK

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Notice how those who propose that the Kennedys ploted to kill Castro are the same fellows who claim that Castro killed JFK, and that the same writers - Russo - Holland - Powers, Corn, et al., also drag out the same expert witnesses - Halpern, Shackley, Haig?

Aren't they the same guys who were on the Cuban Task Force at either CIA Langly or JM/WAVE, and involved in both plots - to kill Castro and Kennedy?

BK

They most certainly were.

Were the plots to kill Castro initiated before January 20. 1961 ?

Yes they were.

Historically, the ACTIONS of those "blood-thirsty" Kennedys don't exactly corroborate their murderous intents.

For example, when JFK had the opportunity to cold-bloodedly kill 350 million Soviets and Chinese with a Nuclear first-strike in 1962 during the missile crisis, did he do it ?

I mean, this President had the chance to kill more people in one 24-hour period than anyone in HISTORY, an act surely to satisfy the blood-lust of anyone seeking to conquer the world, and what did he do ?

He took the first step in disarmament.

When he had the chance to murder Castro as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion, did he ensure the invasion's success and Castro's demise ?

No, quite the opposite.

Patrice Lumumba was arrested and subsequently murdered BEFORE JFK took the oath of office.

Rafael Trujillo was murdered while the President was out of the country.

South Vietnam's Diem was murdered in spite of Kennedy's arrangement to get him safely out of the country and on to Paris.

When RFK sent the Federal Marshalls into Mississippi, were their orders to kill as many people as they could ?

Why would a murderous Attorney General conduct a war on Organized Crime when it would have been much easier to join forces with them ( ala the CIA ) in a common goal of killing Castro ?

It just doesn't make sense that the Kennedys were the biggest murderers in American History and that JFK's assassination was some kind of retribution for what they had done.

I agree with the late Arthur Schlesinger who dismissed the "retribution" angle of the assassination saying that murder was totally " out of character" of the Kennedys.

And as far as I'm concerned, their actions support that.

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  • 5 weeks later...

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=...ategoryId=14510

Cuba Hemingway Letters, Manuscripts to Be Available Online

ErnestHemingway.jpgHAVANA -- The epilogue of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the screenplay for "The Old Man and the Sea," letters, coded texts and even insurance policies taken out by Ernest Hemingway will be available starting next month as part of a digital collection of some 3,000 documents belonging to the Nobel laureate.

The collection, which contains unedited non-literary texts, will be available in Havana to fans and researchers as of Jan. 5, thanks to a project that started in 2001, representatives of the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigia told Efe.

Included in the collection is a "large selection" of the items at Finca Vigia, located some 20 kilometers (12 miles) outside Havana and the legendary writer's home on the island from 1939 to 1961, specialist Inaurys Portuondo said.

"This is an exquisite selection, it's not an arbitrary selection," Portuondo said, adding that the digitalization project was a "gradual process" that Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council completed with the cooperation of the U.S. Social Science Research Council.

In addition to conserving and digitalizing the papers of Hemingway, who lived from 1899 to 1961, the two institutions worked to restore Finca Vigia, which was turned into a museum in 1962.

The property, which reopened in December 2006, will now house the Hemingway digital archive and welcome specialists and researchers from Cuba and abroad who are interested in using it.

"It's not a free service," Portuondo said, adding that there was great "demand and eagerness" on the part of researchers to use the archive.

"There are no unedited literary (pieces), at least as far as we know, but we know that specialists might be able to come up with new theories after consulting" the archive, Portuondo said.

Among the most interesting files in the collection are some texts "in code" that may deal with the German submarines that operated off the Cuban coast during World War II.

The texts were kept in "different formats" and Hemingway likely "did not keep a specific notebook" for them for "security reasons," Portoundo said.

The digital archive will be available "later on" at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and specialists are already working "gradually" on the conservation of 1,000 other documents, Portoundo said.

Hemingway's widow, Mary Welsh, donated Finca Vigia to the Cuban government to fulfill the writer's last wish after he committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Idaho.

The Hemingway collection at Finca Vigia contains approximately 22,000 items, including some 9,000 books, more than 3,000 letters and documents, and about 1,000 photographs, hunting trophies, weapons, and sports and fishing gear.

The Pilar, the fishing boat owned by Hemingway, is now on permanent display at the house, which was built by Catalan architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer, who bought the land in 1887 for use as a family vacation home.

In 1903, the building was sold to a Frenchman, who rented it in 1939 to Martha Gelhorn, Hemingway's third wife, for 100 pesos a month. A year later, the writer became the new owner of the property.

It was at Finca Vigia that Hemingway wrote one of his most famous novels, "The Old Man and the Sea," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

One year later, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=...ategoryId=14510

Cuba Hemingway Letters, Manuscripts to Be Available Online

ErnestHemingway.jpgHAVANA -- The epilogue of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the screenplay for "The Old Man and the Sea," letters, coded texts and even insurance policies taken out by Ernest Hemingway will be available starting next month as part of a digital collection of some 3,000 documents belonging to the Nobel laureate.

The collection, which contains unedited non-literary texts, will be available in Havana to fans and researchers as of Jan. 5, thanks to a project that started in 2001, representatives of the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigia told Efe.

Included in the collection is a "large selection" of the items at Finca Vigia, located some 20 kilometers (12 miles) outside Havana and the legendary writer's home on the island from 1939 to 1961, specialist Inaurys Portuondo said.

"This is an exquisite selection, it's not an arbitrary selection," Portuondo said, adding that the digitalization project was a "gradual process" that Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council completed with the cooperation of the U.S. Social Science Research Council.

In addition to conserving and digitalizing the papers of Hemingway, who lived from 1899 to 1961, the two institutions worked to restore Finca Vigia, which was turned into a museum in 1962.

The property, which reopened in December 2006, will now house the Hemingway digital archive and welcome specialists and researchers from Cuba and abroad who are interested in using it.

"It's not a free service," Portuondo said, adding that there was great "demand and eagerness" on the part of researchers to use the archive.

"There are no unedited literary (pieces), at least as far as we know, but we know that specialists might be able to come up with new theories after consulting" the archive, Portuondo said.

Among the most interesting files in the collection are some texts "in code" that may deal with the German submarines that operated off the Cuban coast during World War II.

The texts were kept in "different formats" and Hemingway likely "did not keep a specific notebook" for them for "security reasons," Portoundo said.

The digital archive will be available "later on" at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and specialists are already working "gradually" on the conservation of 1,000 other documents, Portoundo said.

Hemingway's widow, Mary Welsh, donated Finca Vigia to the Cuban government to fulfill the writer's last wish after he committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Idaho.

The Hemingway collection at Finca Vigia contains approximately 22,000 items, including some 9,000 books, more than 3,000 letters and documents, and about 1,000 photographs, hunting trophies, weapons, and sports and fishing gear.

The Pilar, the fishing boat owned by Hemingway, is now on permanent display at the house, which was built by Catalan architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer, who bought the land in 1887 for use as a family vacation home.

In 1903, the building was sold to a Frenchman, who rented it in 1939 to Martha Gelhorn, Hemingway's third wife, for 100 pesos a month. A year later, the writer became the new owner of the property.

It was at Finca Vigia that Hemingway wrote one of his most famous novels, "The Old Man and the Sea," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

One year later, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is also interesting to note that the JFK Library includes the Ernest Hemingway papers........

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/Exte...mp;jScript=true

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http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=...ategoryId=14510

Cuba Hemingway Letters, Manuscripts to Be Available Online

-- The epilogue of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and the screenplay for "The Old Man and the Sea," letters, coded texts and even insurance policies taken out by Ernest Hemingway will be available starting next month as part of a digital collection of some 3,000 documents belonging to the Nobel laureate.

The collection, which contains unedited non-literary texts, will be available in Havana to fans and researchers as of Jan. 5, thanks to a project that started in 2001, representatives of the Hemingway Museum at Finca Vigia told Efe.

Included in the collection is a "large selection" of the items at Finca Vigia, located some 20 kilometers (12 miles) outside Havana and the legendary writer's home on the island from 1939 to 1961, specialist Inaurys Portuondo said.

"This is an exquisite selection, it's not an arbitrary selection," Portuondo said, adding that the digitalization project was a "gradual process" that Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council completed with the cooperation of the U.S. Social Science Research Council.

In addition to conserving and digitalizing the papers of Hemingway, who lived from 1899 to 1961, the two institutions worked to restore Finca Vigia, which was turned into a museum in 1962.

The property, which reopened in December 2006, will now house the Hemingway digital archive and welcome specialists and researchers from Cuba and abroad who are interested in using it.

"It's not a free service," Portuondo said, adding that there was great "demand and eagerness" on the part of researchers to use the archive.

"There are no unedited literary (pieces), at least as far as we know, but we know that specialists might be able to come up with new theories after consulting" the archive, Portuondo said.

Among the most interesting files in the collection are some texts "in code" that may deal with the German submarines that operated off the Cuban coast during World War II.

The texts were kept in "different formats" and Hemingway likely "did not keep a specific notebook" for them for "security reasons," Portoundo said.

The digital archive will be available "later on" at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and specialists are already working "gradually" on the conservation of 1,000 other documents, Portoundo said.

Hemingway's widow, Mary Welsh, donated Finca Vigia to the Cuban government to fulfill the writer's last wish after he committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Idaho.

The Hemingway collection at Finca Vigia contains approximately 22,000 items, including some 9,000 books, more than 3,000 letters and documents, and about 1,000 photographs, hunting trophies, weapons, and sports and fishing gear.

The Pilar, the fishing boat owned by Hemingway, is now on permanent display at the house, which was built by Catalan architect Miguel Pascual y Baguer, who bought the land in 1887 for use as a family vacation home.

In 1903, the building was sold to a Frenchman, who rented it in 1939 to Martha Gelhorn, Hemingway's third wife, for 100 pesos a month. A year later, the writer became the new owner of the property.

It was at Finca Vigia that Hemingway wrote one of his most famous novels, "The Old Man and the Sea," for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

One year later, Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is also interesting to note that the JFK Library includes the Ernest Hemingway papers........

http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/Exte...mp;jScript=true

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-191011233.html

Kennedy Library Hemingway grants.(John F. Kennedy Library Foundation )(Brief article)

Article from: The Hemingway Review Article date: September 22, 2008 The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation annually awards up to $5,000 in travel grants (individual awards are limited to $1,000) to support research in the library's Hemingway Collection. Applications for the grants are available at

http://www.jfklibrary.org/ehgrants.htm.

For further information and to apply, please contact: Grant and Fellowship ...

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"This is an exquisite selection, it's not an arbitrary selection," Portuondo said, adding that the digitalization project was a "gradual process" that Cuba's National Cultural Heritage Council completed with the cooperation of the U.S. Social Science Research Council.

In addition to conserving and digitalizing the papers of Hemingway, who lived from 1899 to 1961, the two institutions worked to restore Finca Vigia, which was turned into a museum in 1962.

The property, which reopened in December 2006, will now house the Hemingway digital archive and welcome specialists and researchers from Cuba and abroad who are interested in using it.

"It's not a free service," Portuondo said, adding that there was great "demand and eagerness" on the part of researchers to use the archive."

I guess that captitalism must be catching on in Cuba.

I disdain the notion of paying for data like this, unless I am paying a royalty to the beneficiaries of Hemingway's estate.

I don't buy any nonsense about Ernest Hemingway facilitating a hit on Castro, but it is kind of a pleasant thought.

The man was a high school graduate and is regarded as the foremost American 20th century author. He is certainly my favorite, and I like the character traits he attributes to his protaganists, who are all male.

He credits his to-the-point writing style to 4 writing rules given to him at his first newspaper reporting job (either in Toronto or in Kansas City).

Notwithstanding his alcoholism, he was a hard-working man who wrote from around 6:00 a.m until around noon, when he commenced drinking, boxing, fishing, chasing women, etc.

His life was utterly fascinating, albeit a case study in clinical depression.

He was an ambulance driver in Italy in WWI, an ex-pat in Paris in the 1920s, a correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, a war correspondent in Europe in WWII, an accomplished safari hunter, a bullfighting afficienado, a sail fisherman, a boxer, and a general racconteur/roustabout.

I have spent a fair amount of time at his home in Key West, and I hope to one day visit his homes in Cuba, Paris, Oak Park (Illinios) and Ketchum (Idaho).

Edited by Christopher Hall
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Bill, thanks for posting this intriguing article and the recent follow-up.

If we assume the accuracy of Lansdales's memorandum, then the Oval Office meeting with JFK and RFK presents troubling questions.

"A delicate and sensitive" operation involving "fractioning the regime"? What else could they have been discussing but the liquidation of Castro in veiled bureaucratese?

The authors are careful to say that the plan is not entirely clear. And Landsdales's point of view is only one of several.

However, I do think it's significant that Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive believes it refers to assassination.

Does anyone have a link to the complete memo at the Mary Ferrell archives or at NARA?

The JFK Library (as of 2001, at least) has squirreled away unreleased documents referring to Sam Giancana (and others of interest) from the CIA, FBI, and State Department? Is this still going on?

Why won't the Library let historians and researchers view these papers, which were paid for by taxpayers?

What are they hiding?

Most here support the release of government files under FOIA and The JFK Act.

The authors' point is well-taken that we should hold the JFK Library to the same legal standards for any Kennedy papers generated in the course of taxpayer funded official business.

If we don't, it's our loss.

Steve

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